On March 2-4, 2008, a very different kind of conference will take place at the Marriott Times Square Hotel in downtown New York. Hundreds of the world's leading scientists, economists, and policy analysts will come together to explore key issues overlooked by advocates of the theory of man-made global warming.

In Al Gore's environmental tome and movie 'An Inconvenient Truth', he claims that anthropogenic (human-caused) activity will cause irreversible damage to the planet. The basis of this claim is that by using carbon based fuels (oil, gas, coal, wood) to produce energy, we will increase the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere and cause global warming. According to Gore, this global warming will cause glaciers to melt, causing the oceans to rise thereby flooding all the coastal communities. Of course, the poor, minorities, women and children will die first.

Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called "consensus" on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore. The new report issued by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's office of the GOP Ranking Member details the views of the scientists, the overwhelming majority of whom spoke out in 2007. Even some in the establishment media now appear to be taking notice of the growing number of skeptical scientists.

A new poll of likely Iowa Republican caucus voters indicates that climate change is not a concern. When asked what was the single most important issue in their choice for president, none - 0 percent - said global warming. Only 1 percent said the environment was their most important issue. The poll was conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News. It surveyed 501 likely Republican caucus voters, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 points. Immigration/illegal immigration was the top issue for Republicans in the same poll, with 17 percent saying it was the single most important issue in their choice for president.

BALI, Indonesia – A global tax on carbon dioxide emissions was urged to help save the Earth from catastrophic man-made global warming at the United Nations climate conference. A panel of UN participants on Thursday urged the adoption of a tax that would represent “a global burden sharing system, fair, with solidarity, and legally binding to all nations.”“Finally someone will pay for these [climate related] costs,” Othmar Schwank, a global tax advocate, told Inhofe EPW Press Blog following the panel discussion titled “A Global CO2 Tax.” Schwank is a consultant with the Switzerland based Mauch Consulting firm. Schwank said at least “$10-$40 billion dollars per year” could be generated by the tax, and wealthy nations like the U.S. would bear the biggest burden based on the “polluters pay principle.” The U.S. and other wealthy nations need to “contribute significantly more to this global fund,” Schwank explained. He also added, “It is very essential to tax coal.”

[The US] “The world’s biggest culprit” [is the only smart one on the block]

UN [Puppet Master] secretary general in middle of green controversy

The UN secretary-general is in the middle of a controversy after being accused of hypocrisy by the media after he is reported to be traveling around the world for a music concert. After calling on world leaders for immediate action on climate change, Ban Ki-moon flew thousands of miles to the US for a music concert and then leaving in the interval to jet back to Europe. Ban Ki-moon has been slammed for planning a round-the-world trip that will generate thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions just days after he leaves the UN meeting in Bali. The South Korean has organized a post-conference trip, starting on Sunday, that will see him fly to attend the concert in New York, adding more than 4,300 miles to his itinerary. When he leaves the island after the summit the secretary-general will fly to East Timor, and then to Japan where he will briefly stop before catching another flight to the US.

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a scathing attack on climate change prophets of doom, saying that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not claims. The Pontiff suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering and would not do anything to solve any problem. The German-born Pope said that while some concerns may be valid, it was vital that the international community based its policies on science rather than the claims of the environmentalist lobby.

The chief architects behind the global warming fraud are finally being identified by the press. Who are they? (And let’s not forget their names). Adil Najam, Sivan Kartha, and Tariq Banuri.

NONE SO BLIND, NONE SO DEAF

The best brains in the world have turned their backs on the methodology and analysis used by the IPCC, yet the psyche of Governments and their “scientific” advisers remains focused on the false science and false consensus claims put forward by the IPCC, why? What is within the IPCC lobby that blinds you all to the truth? There is absolutely and totally no case whatsoever for man-made global warming. Which part of this assessment of the IPCC’s methodology do the advisers not understand? “A list of the 72 violations of forecasting principles by the IPCC forecasting procedures is provided on the Public Policy Special Interest Group Page at forecastingprinciples.com. The many violations provide further evidence that the IPCC authors were unaware of evidence-based principles for forecasting.

Climate scientists at the University of Rochester, the University of Alabama, and the University of Virginia report that observed patterns of temperature changes (‘fingerprints’) over the last thirty years are not in accord with what greenhouse models predict and can better be explained by natural factors, such as solar variability. Therefore, climate change is ‘unstoppable’ and cannot be affected or modified by controlling the emission of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, as is proposed in current legislation. These results are in conflict with the conclusions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and also with some recent research publications based on essentially the same data. However, they are supported by the results of the US-sponsored Climate Change Science Program (CCSP).

[The Sky is falling, the sky is falling. Now give me £3,300-per-minute!]

Al Gore has come under fire for making personal gain from his mission to save the planet – after charging £3,300 a minute to deliver a poorly received speech. The former American Vice-President was also accused of being "precious" at the London event, demanding his own VIP room and ejecting journalists, despite hopes the star-studded gathering would generate publicity for the fight against global warming. Many of the audience at last month's Fortune Forum summit were restless as Mr Gore, who has won both a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for his campaigning work this year, delivered the half-hour speech that netted him £100,000. The glittering fundraiser was held in The Royal Courts of Justice and attracted world leaders, entrepreneurs and celebrity activists including Bob Geldof, Darryl Hannah and Jerry Hall, who was there as "a Special Ambassador of The Alliance for a New Humanity". Guests had paid between £1,000 and £50,000 to attend.

A WEST Australian medical expert wants families to pay a $5000-plus "baby levy" at birth and an annual carbon tax of up to $800 a child. Writing in today's Medical Journal of Australia, Associate Professor Barry Walters said every couple with more than two children should be taxed to pay for enough trees to offset the carbon emissions generated over each child's lifetime. Professor Walters, clinical associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia and the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth, called for condoms and "greenhouse-friendly" services such as sterilisation procedures to earn carbon credits. And he implied the Federal Government should ditch the $4133 baby bonus and consider population controls like those in China and India.

Unless you have either been asleep or out of the country for the last two years, you are fully aware of the contention made by climate alarmists in the media that rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are responsible for global warming. In fact, this is such a common press theme that in just the last month alone, there have been more than 3,000 (LexisNexis limit) English-speaking news reports around the world containing the words carbon dioxide and global warming/climate change. It therefore goes without saying that this is a large part of the junk science folks like former Vice President Al Gore claim is settled, as they avow there is a significant correlation between the amount of CO2 in the air and the surface temperature of the planet. To save us all from imminent doom, the presence of this heinous greenhouse gas must be reduced immediately.

Friday's adoring Associated Press piece concerning Nobel Laureate Al Gore's noble decision to take the train from the Oslo airport rather than the traditional motorcade to his hotel neglected something else besides the huge amount of carbon dioxide being emitted by the Global Warmingist-in-Chief: his luggage! After all, Gore and wife Tipper aren't going to wear the same clothes this entire trip they wore on the plane, right? So, where was all their baggage as the couple took the train? Well, according to the Norwegian website VG Nett, Gore's luggage went by Mercedes van

Record cold in recent days has been reported in various parts of the globe. Seoul, Korea dropped to -5.3C (22F). Chill reached down to usually balmy Manilla in the Philippines with 19C and lower readings forecast coming. In Bangalore, India, the 12.7C was the coldest since it dropped to 12.2C on November 29, 1991. Temperatures as low as 8C are forecast. In parts of New Zealand where last December was the coldest December on record, record cold has again hit destroying 75% of vineyard grapes. In the United States, Chicago tied a record of 0F set back in 1972 and 1885 Thursday. On Thursday, it reached a record -15F in St. Cloud, Minnesota breaking the record for the date set in 1936. On Wednesday, a low of -19F in Grand Forks, ND, broke the record of -16F set in 1972. Thursday, in Wilkes Barre, Scranton, PA it reached 8F, breaking a 31 year record. It dropped to 7 in Monessen, PA, breaking the record of 11F set in 1977. In Coshocton, OH, it bottomed out at 3F, tying the coldest also set in 1977. Meacham, Oregon, the new low of 2F shattered the old record of 14F set in 1954.

The global climate-change negotiations – which have nothing to do with things global, or with climate change, or with negotiations for that matter - have clustered more users of private jet aircraft than any other convention thrown on earth. As Alan Oxley’s discussion reveals (Cooler heads needed at Bali discussions: Asian countries are now at a crossroads. Will they choose fast growth at the expense of the environment or the other way round? Bangkok Post Business, December 7, 2007) the conference is really not about climate change, but rather, a new economic order, whose climate must change if Europe is going to continue on its path to a socialist utopia.

[World Kool-aid Parade Kicks Off]

Skiers, fire-eaters and an ice sculptor joined in worldwide demonstrations Saturday to draw attention to climate change and push their governments to take stronger action to fight global warming. From costume parades in Manila to a cyclist's protest in London, marches were held in more than 50 cities around the world to coincide with the two-week U.N. Climate Change Conference, which runs through Friday in Bali, Indonesia. Hundreds of people rallied in the Philippines wearing miniature windmills atop hats, or framing their faces in cardboard cutouts of the sun. "We are trying to send a message that we are going to have to use renewable energy sometime, because the environment, we need to really preserve it," high school student Samantha Gonzales said at the rally in the capital, Manila. "We have to act now."

["Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it" - Adolph Hitler]

Within 20 years they will be producing more CO2 than the rich industrialised countries based mainly in the northern hemisphere. Cape Town's main oil refinery next to the ecologically sensitive Rietvlei wetland And even if the 'North' - Europe, North America, the former Soviet Union (FSU) Japan, Australia and New Zealand - eliminated all its emissions immediately it wouldn't be enough to stop severe climate change. The 'South' - Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific islands - faced an environmental disaster. The shock claims are made by the Centre for Global Development (CGD), an American independent, think tank that works to reduce global poverty and inequality. It says its research has been empirically reviewed. The CGD said it was a dangerous fallacy to believe that the North was responsible for climate change and should dramatically cut its emissions while the South should be given the time to catch up with more prosperous countries through economic expansion powered by fossil fuels.

The MO (modus operandi) of the global warming crowd is becoming more obvious with every new “report” they publish.These lies then receive widespread publication as though such comments were newsworthy.Take for instance the latest piece published by the Associated Press:

[The wheels on the Kool-Aid bus go round and round,...]

Mayor Greg Nickels has proposed giving all city employees free bus passes by 2009 to encourage use of transit as a means for reducing the air pollution that causes global warming. "This is a great incentive to get people out of their cars and using public transit," City of Seattle Councilmember Nick Licata said. "This is a great step forward." If the City Council approves Nickels' legislation, the city will double its employees' transit pass subsidy next year to $30 per month, more than half the $54 cost of a one-month PugetPass good for $1.50 trips at peak times within one zone. In 2009 and 2010, the city would cover that pass's cost entirely, even if the rates increase. The program is expected to cost $1.1 million over the next three years; the city has been contributing $15 per month to the cost of its employees' bus passes since 1993. City Councilmember Richard Conlin, who chairs the council's Environment, Emergency Management and Utilities commission, called the proposal a great investment at a relatively modest cost.

Can you believe it? People all over town are lavishing their homes, inside and out, with Christmas lights and electric-powered inflatables. Hasn't anybody heard about global warming? You can't go anywhere without seeing additional, energy-guzzling lights strung on street posts, fences, gates, eaves or around windows like festive cobwebs. Ely is small and may not be contributing much to global warming. But this is going on all over the world. Even non-Christian countries are being sucked into this Christmas, energy orgy. And that energy has to come from somewhere and the emissions go straight into our atmosphere. It's not just the lights. It's the entire, capitalistic commercial frenzy. The Friday after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday by retailers because it's the beginning of the Christmas shopping season when they make the majority of their profits. And when our society emits the most carbon dioxide and pollutants in seeking out those perfect holiday gifts.

SYDNEY (AFP) — Australian scientists are trying to give kangaroo-style stomachs to cattle and sheep in a bid to cut the emission of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, researchers say. Thanks to special bacteria in their stomachs, kangaroo flatulence contains no methane and scientists want to transfer that bacteria to cattle and sheep who emit large quantities of the harmful gas. While the usual image of greenhouse gas pollution is a billowing smokestack pushing out carbon dioxide, livestock passing wind contribute a surprisingly high percentage of total emissions in some countries. "Fourteen percent of emissions from all sources in Australia is from enteric methane from cattle and sheep," said Athol Klieve, a senior research scientist with the Queensland state government.

Nothing inspires taking on the “planetary emergency” of global warming like the first snow of the winter in Washington, D.C. As two inches of snow accumulated outside the U.S. Capitol, the Senate’s Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee debated “historic” global warming legislation sponsored by Sens. John Warner (R.-Va.) and Joe Lieberman (I.-Conn.). “We look around right now and see the snow on the trees – standing out here and say ‘Where is global warming when you need it?’” Sen. James Inhofe (R.-Okla.) said to the Business & Media Institute.

[ENSO did it! - He's the guilty one]

ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) is the technical name given to the most prominentsource of inter-annual variability in weather and climate around the world. Its ocean temperature signatures, the more widely-known La Niña and El Niño, corresponding to different phases of the oscillation, are officially defined as sustained sea surface temperature anomalies of magnitude greater than 0.5°C across the central tropical Pacific Ocean. When ENSO is in the phase known as La Niña, the Pacific trade winds blow true and strong causing sun warmed surface water to pile up against Australia and Indonesia. Cool subsurface water rises in the east. In an El Niño, the trade winds falter and warm water spreads out eastwards across the Pacific Ocean. La Niña and El Niño are the poles of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

"What if everyone believes in global warmism only because everyone believes in global warmism?" The Nobel Committee might as well have called it Al Gore's Inner Peace Prize, given the way it seems designed to help him disown his lifelong ambition to become president in favor of a higher calling, as savior of a planet. The media will be tempted to blur the fact that his medal, which Mr. Gore will collect on Monday in Oslo, isn't for "science." In fact, a Nobel has never been awarded for the science of global warming. Even Svante Arrhenius, who first described the "greenhouse" effect, won his for something else in 1903. Yet now one has been awarded for promoting belief in manmade global warming as a crisis.

BALI, Indonesia — Victims of climate change, real and potential, appealed Tuesday for a vast increase in international aid to protect them from and compensate them for rising seas, crop-killing drought and other likely impacts of global warming. "We cannot wait. We need to do something now," said climatologist Rizaldi Boer of Indonesia, where farmers are already suffering from unusual dry spells blamed on climate change. As seas expand from warming and from the runoff of melting land ice, higher tides are eating away at fragile islands like those of Kiribati, a nation of 92,000 people in 33 island groups scattered over 2 million square miles of the Pacific. Some of the islands are just 100 yards wide at points. "There's nowhere to move back to," Kiribati's president, Anote Tong, told U.N. climate conference attendees. "Because if you move back, you're either in the lagoon or in the ocean."

Could the Sun's inactivity save us from global warming? David Whitehouse explains why solar disempower may be the key to combating climate change. Something is happening to our Sun. It has to do with sunspots, or rather the activity cycle their coming and going signifies. After a period of exceptionally high activity in the 20th century, our Sun has suddenly gone exceptionally quiet. Months have passed with no spots visible on its disc. We are at the end of one cycle of activity and astronomers are waiting for the sunspots to return and mark the start of the next, the so-called cycle 24. They have been waiting for a while now with no sign it's on its way any time soon. Sunspots – dark magnetic blotches on the Sun's surface – come and go in a roughly 11-year cycle of activity first noticed in 1843. It's related to the motion of super-hot, electrically charged gas inside the Sun – a kind of internal conveyor belt where vast sub-surface rivers of gas take 40 years to circulate from the equator to the poles and back.

It's not the waste that rankles so much as the hypocrisy. Some 15,000 politicians, officials, quangocrats and assorted busybodies are descending on Bali for a jamboree that will produce more than 100,000 tons of CO2 emissions. The purpose of their trip? To discuss how to reduce CO2 emissions. We wonder whether there would be so many observers and hangers-on if the venue were, say, Düsseldorf. For many of those attending have no direct involvement in the talks. For example, 19 MEPs, accompanied by advisers and staff, are in Bali, staying at a luxurious spa hotel. Not only will their fares, meals and accommodation be paid for by the rest of us, but they will also claim a further £95 per day. Our purpose is not just to mock the attendees. No, we have a deeper objection.

I was rereading the essay by Dr, Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner and found this account of an experiment R.W. Wood conducted in 1909 that disproved the claim about greenhouses being hotter because they trapped radiation. There appears to be a widespread belief that the comparatively high temperature produced within a closed space covered with glass, exposed to solar radiation, results from a transformation of wave-length, that is, that the heat waves from the Sun, which are able to penetrate the glass, fall upon the walls of the enclosure and raise its temperature: the heat energy is re-emitted by the walls in the form of much longer waves, which are unable to penetrate the glass, the greenhouse acting as a radiation trap.

SYDNEY: Increasing number of divorces are contributing to global warming, says a new study that suggests people should save their marriages to save the environment. After divorce a woman moves out and forms a new household. The study by researchers at the Michigan State University found that this leads to less efficient use of natural resources, more demand for land for housing, and higher expenditure on utilities, reported the online edition of News Australia. Researchers surveyed 3,283 homes in the US between 2001 and 2005. They found that households where couples divorced registered a 61 percent increase in the number of rooms per person, compared with a six percent increase in households where couples remained married. Due to higher consumption per person, an individual in a divorced household might also generate more waste. These factors contribute to global environmental changes such as climate change and biodiversity loss, the study said.

LAW Corner

Dr. Stephen Pidgeon is a two-time recipient of the Congressional Medal of Distinction (2006, 2007), and a designee’ for the 2006 Businessman of the Year award. He has been named in Who’s Who, and Who’s Who in Business, is an ally of the Alliance Defense Fund, a friend of Advocates International, the Rule of Law Institute, the Individual Rights Foundation, the Human Action League, the Institute for Justice, the Federalist Society, the International Justice Society, the Christian Legal Society, the World Evangelical Alliance, and others promoting religious freedom, economic freedom, and civil society throughout the world.

The "Kool Aid" Corner

RFK JR. LASHES OUT AT POLITICIANS SKEPTICAL OF GLOBAL WARMING:

Excerpt: "Get rid of all these rotten politicians that we have in Washington, who are nothing more than corporate toadies," said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist author, president of Waterkeeper Alliance and Robert F. Kennedy's son, who grew hoarse from shouting. "This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors."By GLENN GAMBOA